The present invention relates to a fibrous floor mat or carpet treated with a surfactant.
In general, both the consumers and flooring manufacturers are concerned with the negative impact of soiling on the appearance of floors and carpets. Carpet manufacturers take many steps to minimize the detractive appearance of soils on carpets through careful selection of fibers, soil release finishes, and colors to either make soils easy to remove or hide their presence. Consumers also employ means to minimize the effects of soiling on their floors and carpets by frequent vacuuming and sweeping to retrieve soils. Another means for preserving floor appearance is to trap soils before they are transferred via foot traffic onto permanent floors and carpets. Often this is done with the use of floor mats. To be more useful, floor mats need to trap both wet and dry soils effectively.
Floor mats with an assembled fibrous top surface are highly effective for removing dry soils from the bottom of a shoe. Wet soils also need to be absorbed by these flocked mats. However, the contact time during which this absorption takes place is often very short. Using a normal walking pace of about 100-120 steps per minute, this contact time is about 0.5 second. In this case, it is desirable that these floor mats have quick absorption rates such that wet soils can be absorbed from the bottom of a person's shoes during this short 0.5 second residence time.
It can be easily shown that the presence of a surfactant on a fibrous floor mat will improve its rate of absorption of wet soils. However, these more absorptive mats can cause more severe soiling of surrounding carpets when this surfactant is transferred to surrounding carpets via wet foot traffic. As pointed out by W. A. Kirn in "Mechanism and Inhibition of Carpet Resoiling," published in Soap/Cosmetics/Chemical Specialties, Vol. 56 (1980), pp. 38-44, sticky surfactant residues on permanent carpets will increase their rate of soiling.
Cleaning and antisoiling compositions for treating fibrous floor mats to improve the appearance and inhibit the deterioration of the appearance thereof, or to combine the cleaning and antisoiling compositions for treating fibrous carpet and floor mats, per se, are old in the art. It has been proposed in British Patent Specification No. 1,155,552, published June 18, 1969, to provide a cleaning and antisoiling composition comprising a compound represented by the formula: EQU ROSO.sub.3 M
wherein R is an aliphatic hydrocarbon group and M is an alkyl metal, a second constituent represented by the formula: EQU R.sup.1 CON(CH.sub.3)CH.sub.2 COOA
wherein R.sup.1 is an aliphatic hydrocarbon group and A is either a hydrogen atom or an alkali metal and water.
It is recognized that wetting agents increase the penetration of liquid soils into fibrous carpets treated with same. U.S. Pat. No. 4,107,055, Sukornick et al, issued Aug. 15, 1978, discloses at Col. 13 that fluoroalkyl surfactants are known "powerful wetting agents and would be expected to promote the penetration of soils, particularly liquid soils into substrates such as nylon carpet . . . " Also Table IV of the Sukornick et al. patent teaches the use of a number of other surfactants in "dry soil resistance" compositions for carpets. There are numerous other references which teach surfactants in dry soil resistance compositions for carpets, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 3,961,117, Kydonieus et al., issued June 1, 1976.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a highly absorbent, disposable, surfactant treated floor mat primarily for keeping wet soils off the main carpet.
Another object is to provide such a surfactant treated mat with controlled, minimal surfactant mobility.
Yet another object is to provide test methods to identify surfactant treated fibrous mats which have both improved wet soil absorbency and controlled, minimal surfactant mobility.
Still another object of this present invention is to teach a means for using surfactants on floor mats that will improve absorbency without the deleterious transfer of surfactants onto surrounding floors and carpets.